Bullet proof. The tyranny of distance our Antipodean shores have suffered has somewhat shrunken now in this age of instantaneous communication and accessibility on a global scale. Australian industriousness and artfulness attained over many generations – perhaps as a result of natural challenges and the isolation faced by early settlers – has seen many important and outstanding contributions in the medical, scientific and artistic fields. Equally valuable headway has been made in the audio sphere where among many triumphs (and there are plenty more on the horizon) one of the most successful and conversely simplest products to have cracked the shackles of long-distance trade is the Eichmann Bullet plug. It’s an elegantly straightforward RCA connector (later followed by sockets, speaker posts, banana plugs etc) that has impressed for its performance*, affordable price and while at it helped create a whole new category of minimalist socketry with sonic purity as a priority.
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Eichmann the man has moved on but his legacy has given rise to ETI Research (Eichmann Technologies International since 1999), a company dedicated to continuing its own agenda in the field of high-quality cabling and audio accessories. Reasonably recently the company launched its flagship Quiessence range of which the Reference is the topmost and subject of this review where I’ll check out both interconnect and speaker versions. Other than the Reference you’ll find another three Quiessence cables for both IC and speaker of lesser cost and below that the great value-for-money eXpress range, of which I reviewed the top model back in April 2004 here. In fact back then Rob Woodland was running the company. I'm told that his work and that of Keith Eichmann has resulted in the Quiessence Reference design as a followup from the Keith Eichmann era.